One of my resolutions this year is to make a lot more money. But how? In fact, I’ve noticed recently, it’s very simple: all you have to do is take a popular character with enormous worldwide brand recognition (e.g., King Arthur, James Bond, Sherlock Holmes) and shamelessly reinvent him for the youth demographic.
So, for example, you dress up Dracula in Abercrombie & Fitch, emphasise the sublimated but not consummated sex angle, throw in a werewolf to complete the platonic love triangle, and suddenly you’re Stephenie Meyer selling trillions to pubescents. Or you turn Great Expectations’ Pip from a dreary cipher into a smouldering, pouty-lipped, Professor-Brian-Cox-style hunk of Boy Band gorgeousness, complete with Mr-Darcy-style sexy-sexy water scene, and suddenly you’ve made the most talked-about drama on Christmas TV. As the meerkats say, simples.
I ought to feel curmudgeonly and cross about this prostitution of our great works of literature, but strangely I don’t, for reasons all parents of teenagers or near-teenagers will understand. Once your kids reach a certain age you’re grateful for any opportunity that enables you to be graciously permitted to share their airspace for more than a few grudging seconds. A programme like Sherlock (Sunday, BBC1) may be your one chance in an entire week to snuggle next to your unloving boy without being told how lame you are or what a complete loser or how, like, totally poor you are compared with all the other families who took their kids to Barbados this year like any normal family would…
But even if Boy wasn’t a fan of Sherlock (‘He’s a psycho genius, Dad’) I’m sure I’d still be able to enjoy it quite independently because actually it’s tremendous fun. For some reason I managed to miss the first series entirely, and the more people raved about it, the more determined I grew not to watch it. Occasionally, I’d catch little glimpses of it and be tremendously irritated by the relentless chiaroscuro and the mannered acting and the Mexican stand-offs that seemed to conclude every episode, or so it seemed from my ‘This is rubbish. I’m definitely not watching it’ perspective.
In fact, though, I now realise it’s not rubbish at all. Or at least if it is it’s very high-quality rubbish. Things I particularly like: 1. Sherlock Holmes’s coat. It’s a beauty. An update of the one Withnail wore in Withnail & I but much more fitted, in charcoal, with a gorgeous detail on one of the lapels where the buttonhole is picked out in red thread. 2. Benedict Cumberbatch’s autistic, psycho genius Holmes. Boy is desperate to meet him. I explained there’s no point. Even though Cumberbatch went to Harrow he’s another of those typical thespy Sam West-type class traitors, who want Britain turned into a Marxist state and would have the likes of us sent off to re-education camps.
3. The bits where you see the workings of Sherlock Holmes’s mind. Guy Ritchie does a similar trick in his movie adaptations and perhaps that’s where the idea came from. For example, if Holmes is about to have a fight you’re shown — in slow motion — his visualisation of every stab, punch and counterblow before they actually happen. The TV series’ even more knowing, postmodern twist on this is to have labels actually appearing on the spots to which Holmes is directing his penetrating gaze: ‘carotid artery’; ‘one dog’; ‘two dogs’; ‘three dogs’; etc.
Cumberbatch’s Holmes is considerably more violent than the one in the book. Sure we know that Conan Doyle’s hero was a formidable bareknuckle fighter, keen martial artist (Japanese baritsu wrestling being his speciality) and handy wielder of the riding crop and cane, but he never used his pistol or beat people up with quite so much sadistic relish as the new TV version does. This ought not to work: after all, if Holmes can not only think like Sherlock Holmes but also kill like James Bond where’s the flaw, where’s the sense of jeopardy? Actually, though, it sits rather well with the slick, overstylised, graphic-novelistic tone of the enterprise. This Holmes can do everything because, well, he just can. It pays not to overanalyse.
If you do, the whole thing falls to pieces. For example, there’s a scene where Holmes is visited at home by two slightly menacing men in suits. Why? So that a) we can initially suspect they’re a threat and b) Holmes can study their suits, dog hairs, etc. and deduce that they work for the Queen. Holmes can’t be bothered to change so he goes wearing a sheet. Why? Because Holmes sitting around in an anteroom at Buckingham Palace is more weird and amusing than Holmes getting a call from someone who works for the Queen and being briefed, at his convenience, in an office.
The scene ends with Holmes deducing that the Queen is a smoker. How does he know, Watson wonders. Holmes whips from inside his lovely coat an ashtray (a cheap crystal one of the kind the Queen would never favour) that he has nicked from the sideboard. Yeah, right: because, of course, only smokers keep ashtrays in their homes; non-smokers never ever do, eh?
Comments